Silent night
December 23, 2008 | 10:26 pm
12/23/08
Two aspects of living in the rural north give special poignancy to the winter holidays.
(1) Silence.
On the rare occasions when we have big snow — just snow, no wind or sleet or any other variations of winter storm — the world is embraced in a white velvet silence. It’s a true silence, an utter silence; the only sounds come from your own clothes when you move. The surface of the world is smoothed into innocent beauty while life sleeps beneath. We get the silence for a few minutes or hours a year, maybe once every several years; this year, it came as a gift on the winter solstice.
(2) Darkness.
No streetlights. No neighbor’s porch lights. Mostly, no headlights except your own, winding along the roads back from town. Then, suddenly, a star of Bethlehem floating in the blackness! Oh, it’s somebody’s holiday lights on a barn across the valley. Around a curve, a perfect Christmas tree illuminated in red, green, and white. Or perhaps a blue one. Then darkness. Around another bend, a deciduous tree’s bare branches outlined in gold. Another mile of darkness, until the world leaps into blinding, blinking glow from an extravaganza of Santas and reindeers and trees and stars and snowmen and sleighs, all packed into somebody’s tiny yard and so fully lit that you can almost hear the electric meter spinning. Then, back into darkness — the opposite of snowfall, a rich, deep, inky blue that showcases every star in the heavens.
With this combination, it’s hard to resist singing, “Silent night, holy night / All is calm, all is bright . . .”
Happy holidays!
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants — Carolyn Haley
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Frustration Strikes!
December 17, 2008 | 2:30 pm
Part of opening one’s heart, I suspect, is dealing with the inevitable frustrations of life, accommodating them somehow, learning from them and then letting them go.
I spent a fair amount of time recently designing a new geocache. A multi, it would explore some of the early history of the area around Provincetown. A new geocacher on the Cape (whose goal is to place one ache in every town) suddenly placed a cache in one of the locations I wanted to use! Oh, no! But all was not lost: We contacted her and offered to maintain a cache if she’d place it in an alternate venue. We were still discussing the options when she placed a cache … precisely where I wanted my new multi to end!
(The rule is that a cache cannot be placed within 500 feet of another cache. You see my dilemma!)
So obviously the Universe wasn’t going to cooperate with this particular cache: that couldn’t have been made clearer. I pouted for a while, there’s no question about that. But eventually I realized that, from time to time, it’s good to lose a plan, a goal, a “thing.” Letting go freed me up, for one thing, to stop fretting about it — it was the Project Without An End in Sight for a long time. Letting go allowed me to see that maybe I was doing it for my own reasons, rather than for the pleasure of other geocachers.
Frustration is an inevitable part of life. Good to wrestle with it, from time to time, just to stay in shape for the next time!
РJeannette C̩zanne
Open Your Heart with Geocaching
Posted by: Geocaching, Opening the heart, Peace — jcezanne
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Bowing to the master
December 15, 2008 | 9:07 pm
12/15/08
As we descend to the bottom of the natural year, there’s not much to do about gardening in this part of the country. Everything has been put away and is quiescent under its frozen blanket. Too early yet for the deluge of seed catalogues for next year’s planning, though a few have wandered in; and the growing season itself is still too far away to spend the time planning and dreaming, because if you do all that in December, what’s left for January through April?
All that became moot this week, when weather became the dominant theme. (Weather, of course, has everything to do with gardening! Even in winter, when the plants are busy doing their invisible thing in preparation for the next growing season.)
This winter is off to a roller-coaster start. Freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw-snow-sleet-rain-snow-ice — the fieldstone wall my husband carefully constructed five years ago is burping rocks into the driveway — which itself alternates between mudslide and luge run. Five days ago most of New England was walloped by an ice storm that left more than a million people without power. For days, during deep cold. A third of them still are huddling in darkness. We were lucky to escape this, by a whisker. But we’ve been through it before, and it’s awful: puts the issue of survival square on the table, something we don’t have to think about too often.
Worrying about survival puts us on the same level with plants and animals, who have to deal with the challenge 24/7/365. Nothing is more effective in opening one’s heart to the natural world than having to deal with it up close and personal! If you’re one of the many people in 2008 who had to grapple with fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, ice storms, and droughts, you probably understand what I’m talking about. Nature truly is our master, and that awareness humbles us enough to take a second look at the cycles of life, most clearly illustrated by the plants in our everyday lives.
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants — Carolyn Haley
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What About Black Wednesday?
December 11, 2008 | 8:22 am
A week ago, while I was babbling happily here about geocaching, there was a shakeout in the publishing industry. A number of major publishers announced drastic staffing cutbacks, some lines were stalled or eliminated, salaries frozen. And everyone involved with books held their breath. Is it the end of reading as we know it?
My friend and colleague Dick Margulis had some sensible (and hopefully prescient) words to say about it all, and I’m quoting him here with permission:
Consider this a primer on The Way Business Works, so that you can sanity-check content that comes your way in the next months.
In broad outline, what has happened to the book publishing industry and the newspaper publishing industry (along with many other industries)over the last thirty years is that they have been financialized. Ugly word? Yeah. Ugly concept? Definitely. See “financialization” (better than what I’d have written).
This has led to the current state of affairs in which companies are run not by experts in the stuff the companies deal in every day (such as books consisting of words on paper) but by MBAs who are there to do the bidding of Wall Street speculators, experts in the other kind of books (numbers in spreadsheets). This is a huge cultural shift. We went from a market where people invested in companies based on fundamentals (long-term health of the company and industry) to a market dominated by people who traded stocks based on what used to be called the technical model–looking at the price of the stock from hour to hour rather than looking at what the company does in the world from year to year.
As a result, a half-percent drop in quarterly profits is sufficient justification for cutting head count. It gets the numbers back in line with the expectations of traders.
So that’s where we are. Or rather that’s where we were a couple of months ago.
Now, faced with the very real possibility of Great Depression II if they don’t get smart, Wall Street types are starting to get religion about company fundamentals and to bemoan the depradations of the technical traders.
So stay tuned. You may see a big shift back to valuing companies based on product quality, customer service, and community support. It will take time, and I don’t mean to suggest we’re going to see a return to 1950s-style job security anytime soon, but if you’re not in the habit of paying attention to business news, this might be a good time to start.
While times are undoubtedly grim for all industries, and the publishing industry is taking its share of hits, the reality is that this is neither the first nor the last industry shakeout, and the sky still hasn’t fallen. No, I’m not optimistic that things will go back to where they were — they never do. Anyone reading this old enough to remember the pulp fiction books of the thirties? I thought not, but you’ve heard of them, right? We don’t have them around anymore, but reading is still alive and well. There will be changes. I expect that newspapers and magazines, in particular, are going to see dramatic changes (says the woman who now subscribes to The Atlantic on her Kindle!); but no one will be immune. Ebooks may take the place of some standard books, but the dead-tree version isn’t going away anytime soon. The more things change …
I’d be happier if we spent some of this hand-wringing energy worrying, not about those who are already reading, but about those who are not. We’re still looking at 90 million people in this country who are functionally illiterate, folks. We’re worried about Random House, when we should be worrying about a future in which books won’t be needed, because no one will be able to read them.
РJeannette C̩zanne
Open Your Heart with Reading
Posted by: reading, reading books, Words, Opening the heart — jcezanne
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Working on a Cache
December 4, 2008 | 11:24 am
So how exactly does one place a cache? I’m working on one now, so it’s a good time to unveil the mystery, as it were.
First you need to determine what kind of cache you want to place. You might be a lover of the oft-scored “lame micros.” You might want to give cachers a good long walk in the woods with a standard cache at the end of it. You might want to do a multi, taking cachers from point to point before the final reward. What you want to do will determine to a large extent how you do it.
I specialize in multis that are didactic — that teach the cachers something. I’m currently putting one together that will take cachers on a tour of some of the places where white settlers first interacted with first-nations tribes, not always in the most gracious of ways. The Mayflower, as you may recall, arrived first in Provincetown before heading on to Plymouth (neither of which was its intended destination, oopsie).
So what does it mean? For me, it means that it’s about the journey, not the final. I don’t fill large boxes with trinkets: All cachers get from me is the opportunity to sign a logbook and record having found the cache. So I find the final destination and seek a place to hide the micro in which the logbook will be secreted, not an easy task in an area overrun by tourists in the appropriate seasons! And then I map out the other waypoints and try and find some way to point cachers from one to the next. Often I’ll pick a word or a combination of letters or numbers from a nearby sign — this makes sure that the cacher must actually go to the indicated spot, as opposed to figuring out where the final is and just going there!
I also need to write up a description of the cache, which in my case is generally pretty lengthy (for an example of one of my cache descriptions, click here), since I’m eager to have people learn something as part of their experience. It doesn’t have to be long, of course; it all depends on your cache, what goals you’ve set for it, and so on.
Hopefully next week I’ll have more to report on placing my new cache! In the meantime, the off-season is a great time to start geocaching: you won’t run into as many “muggles,” and you won’t have much competition for the caches out there! Why not give it a try today?
Jeannette Cézanne
Open Your Heart with Geocaching
Posted by: Geocaching, Opening the heart — jcezanne
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